Gothic Subjects. Sian Silyn Roberts
lacks the physiognomy of a traditional love object; she is as “unsightly as a night-hag, tawney as a moor, the eye of a gypsey, low in stature, contemptibly diminutive.”79 In terms of their emotional property, Mervyn brings to the contract the feelings and dependency of a female, while she brings the experience and property of a male.
This rather neat inversion at the level of gender cannot produce a sentimental couple. The split in Mervyn—presented along gendered lines as autochthonous American masculinity and vacuous British femininity—prohibits a sentimental union because Mervyn brings more than just inexperience and dependency to the contract. He also brings indigenous manhood. He has, in other words, a kind of excessive individualism that upsets the sentimental rhetoric of contractualism regardless of who actually gets to wear the pants in this relationship. Likewise, Achsa brings something to the union beyond her masculine attributes. When her unfavorable appearance is likened to that of a “night-hag,” a “moor,” and a “gypsey,” we are clearly in the presence of something in excess of both masculinity and femininity. This excess is presented in racialized terms; resembling both a moor and a gypsy, Achsa is a British Jewess of Portuguese descent who tries, unsuccessfully, to hide her mixed origins from Mervyn.
It is important to my argument that Mervyn spontaneously guess the secret of her essential difference without the aid of sensory clues. There is just something about her that tips him off, prompting him to interrupt one of their conversations:
As I live, my good mamma, those eyes of yours have told me a secret. I almost think they spoke to me; and I am not less amazed at the strangeness than at the distinctness of their story.
And pry’thee what have they said?
Perhaps I was mistaken. I might have been deceived by a fancied voice; or have confounded one word with another near akin to it; but let me die, if I did not think they said that you were—a Jew.
At this sound, her features were instantly veiled with the deepest sorrow and confusion. She put her hand to her eyes, the tears started and she sobbed.80
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